


On Any Given Day

by sabaceanbabe



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 13:51:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/pseuds/sabaceanbabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gale Hawthorne and Peeta Mellark develop an unlikely friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Any Given Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glintwarsgreatest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glintwarsgreatest/gifts).



On any given day, when Gale stopped by the delivery entrance to the bakery, it was the baker himself who answered his knock, but today it’s a boy maybe a year or two younger than himself. There’s a smudge of flour by his nose and a welcoming look in his blue eyes when he opens the door.

“Sorry about the wait,” he says, sounding not quite breathless. “What can I do for you?”

Gale takes a step back, glances past him – _He’s gotta be one of the sons_ , he thinks – but he sees no one else in the backroom. He shifts a little, making sure the brace of rabbits hanging behind his back is where the blond boy can’t see it.

“Where’s Mr. Mellark?” Gale asks.

“Oh, he’s taking care of a big order for the Undersees. Tomorrow is their daughter’s twelfth birthday.”

Disappointed, Gale turns away, again shifting the rabbits to keep them out of sight. Mellark won’t turn him in for poaching, but his wife would do it in a heartbeat and he has no way of knowing if this particular son is more like his father or his mother.

“My dad has a sack of bread and rolls for you.” Gale stops, but doesn’t turn around. Not yet. “He said he doesn’t care what you have in exchange. Whatever it is, it’ll be welcome.” He hesitates a second or two longer, but then turns around to face the Mellark kid once more. He doesn’t bother to hide his kill this time.

“I’m Peeta,” the kid says as he takes a step down from the bakery, holding out a sack strained at the seams. Gale takes it, gives Peeta the brace of bloody rabbits in return; the baker’s boy doesn’t flinch.

“Gale. Gale Hawthorne.” On impulse, he offers his hand to shake.

*

One blustery spring afternoon, after their exchange of goods, Peeta stops him from leaving right away.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Peeta disappears off to the side and Gale hears a rustle of paper. When Peeta reappears a moment later, he has a paper-wrapped package in his hand and he offers it to Gale.

“What’s this?” Gale turns it over in his hands. Whatever it is, the things wrapped in the plain brown paper are warm.

“You’re friends with Katniss Everdeen, right?” Peeta sounds different, suddenly wound up tight as a bow string, and he looks almost relieved when Gale nods. He wonders how the younger boy knows Katniss – Merchant and Seam don’t generally mix – but then he remembers that Katniss sometimes sells her catch to the baker, too. “I heard in school that today is her birthday. I thought— My dad thought she might like something special to celebrate. They’re cheese buns. You can have one, too, if you want.”

*

Peeta joins him in line and they stand together to check in. That surprises Gale. Usually Peeta waits with his friends, other Merchant kids from school. But then he takes a closer look and sees the dark bruise on his left cheek, reddish in the center and fading through purple and blue until it fades out altogether along his jaw line.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Peeta’s gaze slides away until he’s looking at his feet. Gale can’t help but look there, too, at the smudge of dust on Peeta’s shiny black leather shoes, the coating of dust and mud and coal worked into the cracked leather of his own boots.

“Got hit by an elbow wrestling with my brothers this morning.”

Gale raises one eyebrow at that as the line shuffles forward. “Really.” He doesn’t believe it for a minute.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, Peeta changes the subject without a bit of subtlety. “So you’ve only got what? One more of these to go through?”

“Two, if you count today.” More than a dozen, if he counts the Reaping Days he’ll have to go through for his brothers and sister, for Katniss and Prim, for Peeta himself. Glancing again at that bruise, Gale decides he’s not quite ready to let that go. “Next time you ‘wrestle’ with your _brothers_ , maybe you should try to duck.”

*

The hammer twists in his fingers, falls with a dull thud to the rough wood floor below. His ma had volunteered him to help with the preparations to honor the school's new headmaster later that week, so he’s adding a new facade to the stage.

“Need a hand?” Peeta asks, bending over to retrieve the tool before handing it, handle first, back to Gale.

A few feet away, Madge Undersee whispers something to Katniss that makes her smile, a rare enough sight that Gale stares, just for a moment. His hesitation draws Peeta’s attention and when Gale finally reaches for his wayward hammer, he has to tug on it to get the younger boy to release it. Peeta still watches the girls even after he lets go of the hammer.

“You sweet on her?” Gale asks, amused, and Peeta blushes an interesting shade of pink.

“Katniss?” He laughs. “She barely knows I’m alive.” _Katniss?_ He’d meant Madge.

Gale frowns as he sets the nail once more in place and then pounds it into the wood a little too hard; it leaves a dent in the otherwise clean wood of the new façade.

*

Shouting and cheering, laughter and singing, it seems as though all the voices of District 12 blend together into one solid wall of sound.

“Happy Snow Day, Catnip,” Gale says as he sits down beside Katniss in the stands. A few feet below, a couple of boys stand in line, waiting their turn on the wrestling mat against Big Joe Craddock, who hasn’t lost a match all day. Craddock is in Gale’s class at school, but they’ve never been friends.

“Snow Day,” Katniss snorts. “Better not let either of our mothers hear you call it that.” Gale shoots her a grin.

Today is President Snow’s birthday. Celebration is mandatory. Gale tries to think of something witty to say when he catches sight of a blond head down below as Peeta Mellark joins the line waiting to take on Craddock. Gale reaches over and grabs some of Katniss’ fried potato strips.

“Hey! Those are mine!”

“Where’d you get these?” he asks as he pops the warm, salty potatoes into his mouth.

“Greasy Sae gave them to me in exchange for a couple of those squirrels from this morning.”

The two of them had snuck through the fence not long after dawn. Gale ran his trap lines, collecting up a pair of rabbits and resetting several sprung traps, empty of game, while Katniss took down half a dozen squirrels. Once they’d field dressed their catch, they’d headed back in to get cleaned up for the big Snow Day party.

And Katniss was right: if his ma heard him call it that, especially where a Peacekeeper might hear, she’d wash his mouth out with soap. It wouldn’t matter a bit that he’s bigger than she is any more than it would matter that one of those Peacekeepers, Darius, was almost a friend.

Cries of “Crad _dock_! Crad _dock_!” and “You can take that little guy, Big Joe!” draw Gale’s attention back to the wrestlers.

“Is that Peeta?”

“Who?” Katniss asks, looking in the same direction as Gale.

“The baker’s youngest,” Gale answers her.

Peeta shakes his arms, squats down and bounces back up to stretch out his muscles. The big prize for the day is a fifteen pound turkey and a five pound sack of potatoes. Craddock’s family is pretty well off by Seam standards, but Gale knows from some of the things Peeta has said that the Mellarks don’t get much profit from their bakery, not like people think, that most of their wares go for a discounted price to Head Peacekeeper Cray or to a couple of the important Merchant families.

More people join the cheering for Craddock, shouting for him to squash his opponent. There’s a flash of red farther down the stands, closer to the wrestling mat, and a woman’s voice shouts above the others, “Go, Big Joe!” Mrs. Mellark. Peeta’s mother.

“His own family is betting against him,” Gale mutters under his breath.

“What was that?”

He glances over at Katniss. “Nothing.”

Craddock charges Peeta, but the smaller boy evades him, drops to the mat and goes for Craddock’s knees, but he in turn dances out of reach. More cheers. More cries of “Crad _dock_! Crad _dock_!” Peeta’s mother among them.

Peeta glances into the stands and Gale knows he’s heard his own mother cheering for his larger opponent. Without thinking about what he’s doing or how it might look, Gale jumps to his feet. “You’ve got this, Mellark!” he shouts through cupped hands to focus the sound. “Take him out!”

Katniss looks up at Gale. “You’re cheering for the baker’s boy?”

Gale looks out toward Peeta, who raises a hand in a brief salute before charging Craddock in the same move the bigger boy had used on him a moment earlier, but instead of slipping out of Peeta’s grasp, Craddock crashes to the mat and Peeta pins him there.

“Somebody ought to.”

*

Gale’s world begins to cave in with the utterance of two words.

“I volunteer!” Katniss pushes her way through the throng, shouting frantically as Peacekeepers try to restrain her, “I volunteer as tribute!” Everything goes quiet except for the sound of Prim shouting her sister’s name.

 _This can’t be happening_ , Gale thinks, his breath caught in his throat, his heart pounding in his chest, his blood roaring in his ears. Trinket starts prattling on about Prim and Katniss and Prim is screaming and crying and all Gale knows is that he can’t just stand there. He has to do something so he breaks through the barrier of Peacekeepers and runs for Prim even as more Peacekeepers escort Katniss up those damn stairs to the stage.

Things just go downhill from there, because moments later, with Prim in his arms, clinging to his shoulders and sobbing into his neck, Trinket calls another name.

“Peeta Mellark.”

The words are on the tip of Gale's tongue, words that will save one friend’s life at the expense of his own. In the space of one breath and the next, one deep breath pulled in to shout those two life shattering words, he thinks of the little girl in his arms, the baby in his mother’s, his brothers, Katniss’ mother, his own mother once more. He lets that breath go, the words – _I volunteer_ – unuttered.

Staring at Katniss and at Peeta, both of them standing shocked and scared on that stage, the only thing he can say to the one is “I’m sorry,” and to the other, “I’ll take care of them.”

Prim, still sobbing against his neck, doesn’t seem to hear him, or if she does, she doesn’t understand, but both Katniss and Peeta, having found him in the crowd, nod their understanding as Gale’s dreams of a future fall into a pile of black dust.


End file.
